The prophets on the whole are pretty unpopular. Yes, there are passages
we love to hear, about Emmanuel, or changing hearts of stone for hearts of
flesh, etc., but the preponderance of prophetic oracles tends toward
condemnation and the call to change our ways.

It is hardly the first time I note that the message of Our Lady of La
Salette fits squarely within this tradition. What strikes me today, however, is
how that message helps us understand the prophets better, and even gives us a
particular insight into today’s Gospel.

Mary did not complain for complaining’s sake, the prophets found no joy
in condemning, and the Gospel scene of confronting an offending fellow
Christian before the whole community is daunting at best.

But the goal in each instance is reconciliation. When Jesus holds out
the prospect of “winning over” one who has sinned against us, he is not talking
about winners and losers. When peace is restored and the community is healed,
everybody wins.

Ideally, this comes about through gentle dialogue. The prophets took
this approach when they reminded the people of God’s saving deeds and, as the
Beautiful Lady also did, promised abundant blessings to those who would turn
back to him. St. Paul has the same attitude when he writes, “Love is the
fulfillment of the law.”

That failing, however, the prophets, and St. Paul, and the Blessed
Virgin were not above taking a more forceful approach. In last week’s first
reading Jeremiah grumbled about having to preach “violence and outrage” all the
time. It reminds me of the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “I must be
cruel, only to be kind!” Or, to be more
scriptural: “At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for
pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are
trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

If Mary could have achieved her purpose with soft words only, she would
not have spoken as she did. But she said what she had to say, so that she and
we could all be winners.

mardi 26 août 2014

All three of today’s reading have a certain bleakness to them. Jesus
tells us to carry our cross, and says we will be repaid according to our
conduct. Jeremiah takes no pleasure in being a prophet of doom. And while St.
Paul frames his admonition in a positive light, we have to face up to the
challenge held in his words, “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” echoing
Jesus’ words to Peter, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings
do.”

The message of Our Lady of La Salette contains a similar challenge.
Mary enters, so to speak, the fray, the battle over true thinking and true
values. When we blame God for our troubles, when we abuse his name and treat
the gift of the Eucharist with indifference, we are certainly far from thinking
as God does.

Today the battle over truth continues. It is most obvious in the
statements of those scientists who mock all religions, or of those historians
ready to blame all the world’s ills on religion. But it appears also whenever
“this age” subtly invites us to “conform” to its values.

The Beautiful Lady did not engage in a lengthy philosophical or
theological discourse. Speaking to simple children and, through them, to simple
people, she spoke in language they could understand. The early history of La
Salette shows that most people understood.

But the secular press, in two articles published a few days apart in
February 1847, took a very different approach. One paper described those who
believed in the Apparition as “the least enlightened portion of the
population;” another labeled them “simple-hearted” and called the timing of the
message, in the midst of a food crisis, “a crime.”

Then as now, the starting point determines the conclusion. Every
culture has a different way of reasoning. Things “make sense” in one culture
but not in another.

Mary’s “people,” though not very faithful, were still in a Christian
culture. Her goal was to help them “discern what is the will of God, what is
good and pleasing and perfect.”

samedi 16 août 2014

In the superb play and film, The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller and
her teacher Annie Sullivan, keys play a significant role. Annie labors to gain
access, to find the key, to the mind of the blind and deaf child. She succeeds
in the end, and great is the rejoicing on both sides.

Teachers and parents know how difficult it can be to “reach” children.
They also know that what works for one may not work for another.

Our Mother Mary—”Mama Mary” as she is called in some
cultures—understands this, and at La Salette it is very clear that she is
trying to “reach” her people.

Hers are not “the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven” given to St. Peter.
She has not come to “bind” or “loose.”

She does not come clothed with ecclesiastical authority. Rather, she
wears the ordinary garb of a peasant woman, and the children (because of her
tears, perhaps?) immediately assumed she must be a mother.

She gained easy access to their hearts by the kind tone of her voice,
her encouraging words, and—why not?—by her beauty. Didn’t Maximin and Mélanie
keep calling her the Beautiful Lady?

Gaining access to her people was a different matter. She who understood
“the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” needed the right key
or, rather, keys to communicate it.

Words, for those who are
especially responsive to the power of prophetic language.

Tears, for those who are
especially capable of compassion.

Symbols, for those who are
especially attuned to the visual.

Her choice of witnesses, for
those who are especially inclined to be skeptical.

Any one of these, or any combination, may be what it takes for her
people to open their hearts to her and, through her, once again to her Son.

If she succeeds, then, as for Helen Keller and her teacher, great will
be the rejoicing on both sides.

jeudi 14 août 2014

Today’s Gospel is one that many
find puzzling, shocking, offensive even. A woman comes to Jesus, pleading for
her child’s well-being; how can he compare her to a dog simply because she is
not Jewish?

Our Lady of La Salette compared
“her people” to dogs simply because they ate meat during Lent. Today’s Lenten
discipline is much less demanding than it was in 1846, but the painful impact
of the phrase “like dogs” is by no means diminished.

Search the Scriptures for “dog”
and “dogs,” and only in the Book of Tobit will you find a dog that appears to
be a companion animal, a pet. None of the other 40-or-so references to dogs
implies the least affection for them.

Apart from the offending phrase,
however, the Beautiful Lady is much more like the woman in this story. Mary
says, “If I want my Son not to abandon you, I am obliged to plead with him
constantly.” The Canaanite woman is in the same situation, “calling out” after
Jesus and his disciples.

Their concern is similar, too.
The woman wants her daughter to be delivered from a demon. Mary wants her
people to be delivered from the danger they have fallen into because of their
failure to recognize the blessings of their Christian faith.

For example, we read today in the
prophet Isaiah, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
Mary says, “In the summer, only a few elderly women go to Mass. The rest work
on Sunday all summer long. In the winter, when they don’t know what to do, they
go to Mass just to make fun of religion.”

Similarly St. Paul writes to the
Gentile Christians of Rome: “You once disobeyed God but have now received
mercy.” At La Salette, the Blessed Virgin weeps over our disobedience, even as
she invites us to “submit” to her Son, which is the same as saying “return to
his mercy.”

How fortunate was that child to
have a mother whose faith, as Jesus observed, was so great that she was able to
submit to his unflattering analogy. How fortunate we are to have Mary as our
Mother urging us to submit to his love.

St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans devotes three whole chapters to his
concern for his own people, the Jews. In his missionary travels, he always went
to the local synagogue to bring the Good News first to them. It was so obvious
to him that Jesus was the promised Messiah, that he could not understand why it
wasn’t so obvious to others who also knew the Law and the Prophets.

It is not hard to see a parallel to La Salette. It was concern for her
people that moved the Blessed Virgin to show herself weighed down by the chain
of their sins and, in some ways worse, by their seemingly total indifference to
the things of God.

Mary could have chosen any of many possible ways to appear and to
express herself. Her prophetic and even severe utterances could have been
accompanied by wind, earthquake or fire. She chose tears instead, not so
different, really, from the “tiny whispering sound” Elijah heard, in the first
reading. She chose a tone and manner calculated to dispel the fears of Mélanie
and Maximin.

Both St. Paul and the Beautiful Lady are grieved to see their people’s
refusal to recognize the gift of God, but they do not rail against them.

“O you of little faith,” Jesus says to Peter, “Why did you doubt?” That
question, fundamentally, is the same one raised by Mary and by St. Paul. Why do
their people doubt? Why can’t they see?

As believers, we deal with the same question, as we see friends and
family members abandoning the practice of their faith, or espousing another
religion, or announcing they no longer believe in God. We continue to love and
respect them as before, hopefully, but there is no denying our disappointment
and sadness. If we try to coax them back, we can be worse off, frustrated
ourselves and resented by them. Often the best we can do is pray, placing them
in the Lord’s hands.

If you have had this experience, then you are in a special position to
understand the grief expressed by St. Paul and Our Lady of La Salette. Let them
also teach you hope. Paul never gave up on his people, Mary never gives up on
hers either.